2014 Book 36: Pandemic
Book 36: Pandemic (Infected, Book 3) by Scott Sigler, isbn: 9780307408976, Crown, 584 pages, $26.00
The Premise: (from the Goodreads page): The explosive conclusion to the New York Times bestselling trilogy that began with Infected and Contagious. The alien intelligence that unleashed two horrific assaults on humanity has been destroyed. But before it was brought down in flames, it launched one last payload-a tiny soda-can-sized canister filled with germs engineered to wreak new forms of havoc on the human race. That harmless-looking canister has languished under thousands of feet of water for years, undisturbed and impotent...until now. Days after the new disease is unleashed, a quarter of the human race is infected. Entire countries have fallen. And our planet's fate now rests on a small group of unlikely heroes, racing to find a cure before the enemies surrounding them can close in.
My Rating: Five stars out of five
My Thoughts: Well, goddammit, Scott Sigler. Just when I thought you couldn't screw over your characters and upset your readers any more than you managed in Contagious, you have to go and top yourself. Folks, if George RR Martin has set the standard in fantasy fiction for putting readers through it, Scott Sigler is his peer on the science fiction side of the coin. No mistake: Pandemic is no roller coaster ride: it's the Autobahn at 160 mph or greater. From the opening scene on an Navy sub in Lake Michigan through almost the very last moments, Sigler moves his characters and the action full-tilt, navigating expertly between multiple points-of-view that give the reader greater access to what's going on -- and thus a greater sense of how horrible the big picture is -- than the characters have. And even then, the author manages to spring a few surprises on the reader that I will not spoil in this review; heart-wrenching surprises to say the least.
While there are a few returning characters from the preceding books (Margaret Montoya and Clarence Otto from Infected and Contagious most notably, but also Tim Feely from Ancestor, which is set in the same universe but not a direct part of the Infected trilogy), a majority of the cast are characters new to this novel. One of Sigler's hallmarks is his ability to build a connection between new character and reader quickly and permanently, often in the space of a paragraph or a single scene. Steve Stanton, Cooper Mitchell, Jeff Brockman, Paulius Klimas, Sofia ... all of these new characters click with the reader and what they experience matters just as much as the familiar returning characters' travails, even before the disparate character arcs start to connect. And when they do connect -- when the arcs come together and most of the main characters are in the same place at the same time -- then Sigler does what Sigler does best: balls-to-the-wall, pedal-to-the-metal action that doesn't sacrifice character (something I suspect Michael Bay could learn from Sigler).
Sigler also knows how to gross his readers out (and to be honest, most of us enjoy it). Readers inured to images of people carving purple triangle shaped aliens out of their own skin, or swelling up like giant balloons and bursting to expel pollen-like contagion will be delighted to know that new horrific permutations of the alien disease await.
This is the end of the Infected trilogy, but I eagerly look forward to where the Siglerverse goes from here.
The Premise: (from the Goodreads page): The explosive conclusion to the New York Times bestselling trilogy that began with Infected and Contagious. The alien intelligence that unleashed two horrific assaults on humanity has been destroyed. But before it was brought down in flames, it launched one last payload-a tiny soda-can-sized canister filled with germs engineered to wreak new forms of havoc on the human race. That harmless-looking canister has languished under thousands of feet of water for years, undisturbed and impotent...until now. Days after the new disease is unleashed, a quarter of the human race is infected. Entire countries have fallen. And our planet's fate now rests on a small group of unlikely heroes, racing to find a cure before the enemies surrounding them can close in.
My Rating: Five stars out of five
My Thoughts: Well, goddammit, Scott Sigler. Just when I thought you couldn't screw over your characters and upset your readers any more than you managed in Contagious, you have to go and top yourself. Folks, if George RR Martin has set the standard in fantasy fiction for putting readers through it, Scott Sigler is his peer on the science fiction side of the coin. No mistake: Pandemic is no roller coaster ride: it's the Autobahn at 160 mph or greater. From the opening scene on an Navy sub in Lake Michigan through almost the very last moments, Sigler moves his characters and the action full-tilt, navigating expertly between multiple points-of-view that give the reader greater access to what's going on -- and thus a greater sense of how horrible the big picture is -- than the characters have. And even then, the author manages to spring a few surprises on the reader that I will not spoil in this review; heart-wrenching surprises to say the least.
While there are a few returning characters from the preceding books (Margaret Montoya and Clarence Otto from Infected and Contagious most notably, but also Tim Feely from Ancestor, which is set in the same universe but not a direct part of the Infected trilogy), a majority of the cast are characters new to this novel. One of Sigler's hallmarks is his ability to build a connection between new character and reader quickly and permanently, often in the space of a paragraph or a single scene. Steve Stanton, Cooper Mitchell, Jeff Brockman, Paulius Klimas, Sofia ... all of these new characters click with the reader and what they experience matters just as much as the familiar returning characters' travails, even before the disparate character arcs start to connect. And when they do connect -- when the arcs come together and most of the main characters are in the same place at the same time -- then Sigler does what Sigler does best: balls-to-the-wall, pedal-to-the-metal action that doesn't sacrifice character (something I suspect Michael Bay could learn from Sigler).
Sigler also knows how to gross his readers out (and to be honest, most of us enjoy it). Readers inured to images of people carving purple triangle shaped aliens out of their own skin, or swelling up like giant balloons and bursting to expel pollen-like contagion will be delighted to know that new horrific permutations of the alien disease await.
This is the end of the Infected trilogy, but I eagerly look forward to where the Siglerverse goes from here.